SPARTA, Ky.—A new crew chief alone couldn’t fix Danica Patrick’s battles with a loose race car that have bothered her all season and certainly couldn’t do anything about a grass-covered grille that forced her to pit under green during the Nationwide Series race Saturday at Kentucky Speedway.

Patrick, in her first race with interim crew chief Ryan Pemberton, ended up two laps down in 14th in the Kentucky 300.

“Ryan made a good call to do a lot of stuff on the first stop,” Patrick said in her postrace radio interview with the Performance Racing Network.

“When I went back out and I was still loose, I said, ‘It’s a damn good thing you did that.’”

The JR Motorsports driver lost one of those two laps when she had to pit under green early in the event because her oil temperature pegged at 300 degrees as the grass-covered grille kept air from running through the vents and cooling the engine.

“We took big swings at the beginning but it just took a couple of (pit) stops to get it OK,” Patrick said in her ESPN interview afterward. “Then it was OK, but we were just down by then.

“The one thing that definitely threw us off a little bit, the grille got covered … and it was about ready to blow.”

Pemberton told Patrick after the race that he needed to make better adjustments between practice and qualifying. The team’s new competition director, Pemberton also is serving as interim crew chief for Patrick after the departures of competition director Tony Eury Sr. and co-owner/crew chief Tony Eury Jr.

The day wasn’t totally sour for JR Motorsports. Patrick’s teammate, Cole Whitt, finished sixth and credited Patrick and Pemberton for that run.

“We were really bad on the speed charts (Friday) and we really used our teammate a lot—Danica really helped us out with setups and Ryan Pemberton (did),” Whitt said. “It was pretty cool to finally work as a team like that—we hadn’t done that in a while.”

Patrick remained 11th in the Nationwide Series standings.

“It was a bummer,” Patrick said in her TV interview. “I was hoping for a good day … but unfortunately it was much more ‘survive it and finish.’”